Recording - December 2011 - 28

Vir2 Instruments Violence
$99.95; www.vir2.com

Vir2’s Violence is touted as “a multidimensional and innovative virtual instrument that harnesses extremely unusual textures, manglings, distortions, and perspectives on the solo violin”. As a violin player, I expected some really interesting things, and Vir2 delivered. Violence comes as a 761 MB archive download from Big Fish Audio, with separate files for MAC/Win. The install is fairly standard—extract the executable, run it, and install the library to your plug-in directory. Authorization, relatively painless as usual, is provided by Native Instruments’ Service Center (since Violence is based on the NI Kontakt 4 Player). Patches are organized into four categories: Drum Kits, Melodic, Pads and SFX, and Tempo Synced. Each patch comes with a variety of custom-scripted virtual knobs such as attack, stereo spread, reverb, filters, and more, to further mangle and adjust parameters depending on what patch you select. While a solo violin may have been the sound source, you really wouldn’t know it from the majority of the 80+ patches that are included in the library. Violence is definitely not an orchestral sample pack in the usual sense. Vir2 offers up a surprising mix of sonic brushes for your musical canvas, sometimes dark and brooding, sometimes light and airy, and still other times throbbing and grating. Mix, match and mangle as you see fit, or use one of the included 15 multis. Violence is full of quirky sonic goodness, and unusual timbres that are perfect for scoring or sound design in that action film. Furthermore, for the price you really can’t go wrong with this library even if you just want to have some fun.—AG

Valhalla DSP ValhallaShimmer
$50; www.valhalladsp.com

In talking about ValhallaRoom, however, we skipped over a somewhat less “realistic” but still incredibly beautiful reverb plugin called ValhallaShimmer. Sean Costello of Valhalla DSP reports in his blog that ValhallaShimmer was the result of a whole series of happy accidents, where experimentation with reverb, diffusion, and pitch shifting led him to beautiful sounds that were nothing like what he’d set out to achieve but were worthwhile nonetheless. So what does this happy accident get you? In very simple terms, ValhallaShimmer is a huge room reverb with pitch shifting applied to the reverb tail. There are controls for wet/dry mix, pitch shift (±12 semitones), feedback, diffusion, room size, low and high cut filters for the reverb tail, and modulation rate and depth. In addition, you can select one of four reverb modes (mono and three sizes of stereo), one of five pitch modes (see below), and either a “bright” or “dark” color mode. ValhallaShimmer isn’t meant to sound like other reverbs, and it doesn’t play like other reverbs either. Even its shortest reverb tail is gigantic, and at large Size values it sings seemingly forever. The color mode changes the character of the overall reverb, but the “dark” setting is really more “less sparkly” rather than truly dark... in my tests, ValhallaShimmer simply doesn’t do dark unless you crank the filters way down, which sort of misses the point. Similarly, even the “small stereo” reverb mode isn’t terribly small by most reverbs’ standards. The pitch modes are lots of fun to play with; you can pitch shift up or down, or in both directions at once, and reverse the process for a smoother sound. One special shout out to Valhalla DSP for optimizing ValhallaShimmer’s controls so they can be automated without glitching. For example, turning the Size knob up and down in real time produces amazing swept tails that have to be heard to be believed. And ValhallaShimmer is fairly CPU-light, too, although you won’t want to use more than one or two instances at a time simply because it’s such an overwhelming, dense sound. If you’re like me and think one can never have too much reverb, and are always on the lookout for something genuinely different, head over to Valhalla DSP and give ValhallaShimmer a try. Bring your parachute and be ready to float.

Audio Damage Discord3 and PanStation
$59 and $39; www.audiodamage.com I’ve made no secret of how much I enjoy Audio Damage’s plug-ins and virtual instruments; they’re affordable, sound great, and combine a unique and fresh but always very musical approach to signal processing with clean, inspiring user interface design. Chris Randall and Adam Schabtach bring real love to these plug-ins, and that love is very evident in the latest version of the venerable Discord pitch shifter/delay and in the new Panstation autopanner. Discord3 is not only a version number; it’s also a reference to how many ways this new version can shift pitches of stereo material. In addition to the original Discord pitch shift algorithm, now called “Vintage”, there are two new algorithms: Clean, which as it says is a cleaner version of the original, and

Valhalla DSP seems to specialize in plug-ins that start in reality and gently push you into the realms of fantasy; in our September 2011 issue we listened to ValhallaRoom, a very flexible and tonally rich algorithmic room/hall reverb, and were very impressed with what we heard.
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RECORDING DECEMBER 2011

http://www.vir2.com http://www.valhalladsp.com http://www.audiodamage.com

Recording - December 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - December 2011